Dr Lucas McMahon

I am a British Academy International Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Exeter. My work is on the late Roman and Byzantine world and is broadly concerned with the interaction between people and the state, as well as spatial history, foreign affairs, and medieval Greek history-writing. I am a specialist in historical GIS (Geographic Information Systems) and my work has appeared in Late Antique Archaeology, Mediterranean Historical Review, Byzantinische Zeitschrift, Crusades, and elsewhere. 

 Currently I am writing a book, Information and Empire in New Rome, AD 600-1200. Often intangible, abstract, and detectable only through its effects, information was the dark matter that held together pre-modern empires. Information and Empire is an anarchist history of information control in the medieval eastern Roman Empire that focuses on the total information regime by which the state watched its neighbours, repressed dissent, and extracted the resources necessary for its existence and reproduction. The aim is to comprehend the lived experience of empire in the distant past while also providing a template for understanding the relationship between information, power, and the state in a comparative historical perspective.